The Challenge of Facebook’s Graph Search

Facebook is hoping that its new search engine will be the next big thing. But it will need a lot more cooperation from users.

On Tuesday, Facebook unveiled Graph Search, a tool that mines its vast trove of user data and surfaces results based on social signals, such as Facebook “likes.” CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the service as one of the social network’s three main pillars. One day, he mused, it could be a real business for Facebook. The hope is that people will use the tool not only to search for friends’ college photos when they’re bored, but also to discover local sushi restaurants, new music, singles in their neighborhood and employees for their businesses.

The problem: Facebook’s search engine is only meaningful if users are willing to give up more of their data, according to many analysts. That requires not only trust, already a prickly issue for Facebook, but also a major shift in how users spend their time on Facebook.

“We are at the very early stages of Graph Search, and look forward to seeing how people use the product and to learn from them,” a Facebook spokeswoman says.

Danny Sullivan, a founding editor of Search Engine Land, says it will be hard for Facebook to be a robust search engine because users don’t naturally share everything they do in the real world, such as visits to their children’s schools or doctors’ offices. He doesn’t believe Google provides a fulfilling experience for “friend-oriented recommendations” searches either, but says it’s hard to imagine a world where
Facebook friends have liked enough local businesses to make the tool comprehensive for local business searches.

“People may never want to check in with their children’s pediatrician,” he said. “And just because I don’t check in my children’s schools doesn’t mean I don’t like their schools.”

Mr. Sullivan says for most people, there’s a lot of stuff left off of Facebook. He reads a lot of books, for instance, but he rarely notes them on Facebook.

That incomplete nature of Facebook’s data can lead to some misleading results. A quick search, for example, of nearby people who are single yields a list of local friends and friends of friends who have listed themselves as “single.” However, this search, which potentially threatens to displace services like Match.com, included people in relationships because some unmarried young people don’t bother to change their relationship status to “in a relationship” because of the awkwardness of breaking up on Facebook if the relationship comes to an end.

Facebook’s Graph Search is also muddling through the challenge of how to best surface and rank results. A ranking algorithm, dependent on signals like “likes,” connections, comments and other interactions, helps dictate which items are pushed to the front of results. Mr. Zuckerberg said that when he searched for photos of himself and his wife, the photos with the most likes and comments were at the top. For searches of nearby restaurants, a lot of check-ins into that restaurant will help its placement in results. Mr. Zuckerberg on Tuesday said the company is working on encouraging reviews, such as star ratings of restaurants when people check in.

“People go to Facebook, to hang out, to express themselves, people don’t necessarily go there to find a restaurant,” says Apostolos Gerasoulis, a professor of computer science at Rutgers University. “It’s hard to push people to go to Facebook for something else, unless Facebook can give them significantly higher quality results.

He adds Facebook will need to find new ways to collect and parse data, well beyond “likes” or “check-ins,” to better anticipate what a user will like and what kind of music or local businesses, for example, would interest them.

“We will be looking at the feedback and data we get from the slow roll out to continually improve the order of search results so that the recommendations get better over time,” the Facebook spokeswoman says.

Then there’s the problem of trust. Over the past nine years, Facebook has had its share of privacy flaps. Last year, it finalized a settlement with regulators that will subject it to privacy audits for the next two decades. For its search tool, Facebook has tried to blunt privacy concerns early and announced plans to remind users to review what data they share. The company says users will only be able to search for data they already have access to.

Even so, Graph Search will make it incredibly easy for people to immediately retrieve information about their friends. Users may not feel comfortable that co-workers can find their college photos with one click, instead of four or five clicks. In practice, obfuscation can be a form of privacy.

“The issue is that privacy is not just what information could be found about you, but how that information can be discovered, how it could be aggregated and sliced and diced,” says Chris Conley, a Technology and Civil Liberties Fellow at the ACLU of Northern California. Mr. Conley also takes issue with how Facebook will make sure that companies aren’t taking advantage of search to target consumers. The company has said companies won’t be allowed to use Graph Search to target consumers, under its terms of service, though it’s unclear how that will be enforced or monitored.

“There’s a responsibility on Facebook to do more than tell businesses to act properly,” Mr. Conley says.

The Facebook spokeswoman says: “We understand that Graph Search provides another way for content you have shared on Facebook to be surfaced, and have taken steps to educate people on privacy settings and encourage them to review their content on Facebook and take action on anything that they don’t like.” said.

There are other signs that Facebook could be losing its users’ trust. Last month, the company was forced to backtrack on certain proposed changes to its terms of service for Instagram, its photo-sharing service, after users’ loudly said some of the new terms would allow advertisers to use their content and images for ads.

According to Patrick Salyer, CEO of Gigya, a service that helps sites integrate with social networks, Facebook users are beginning to pull back on using Facebook Connect, or using their Facebook log-ins to connect to third party sites and services. Gigya, which touches a billion users through its work, says Facebook Connect’s share of the social log-in market grew steadily until 2012, when it began to level off and now hangs at roughly 50%. Mr. Salyer says it’s a sign of wariness.

“Users don’t understand how their data is being used,” he says. “They’re looking for increased transparency, a better idea of what’s happening.”

Correction & Amplification: Gigya CEO Patrick Salyer’s name was incorrectly spelled in an earlier version of this post.